I Dream of Common Wealth

Every day, whenever the blogging gets me down, I go for a walk down by the river. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

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No, wait.

A great American novel seems to have broken out here. Let's try this again.

Every day, when the blogging gets me down, I go for a walk down by the river. There is a pedestrian walkway along the Charles that starts in Cambridge and ends in Waltham, winding along the banks of the river under a canopy of trees. In springtime, you can see entire families of ducks and geese set out for the first time into the great wide world, and you can watch them grow all summer and into the fall. It is a cool place to be in the high heat of the summer, and a brilliant place to be under the gray and muscular autumn clouds. And it doesn't cost me a dime to walk along the river. I don't need to buy a permit. I don't need a token in my pocket. It is just there to soothe my soul and brighten my spirits because the Commonwealth (God save it!) determined that it would build and maintain this walkway for all its citizens, rich or poor, young or old. It belongs to all of us. It is there because the Commonwealth perceived that it has an obligation to create and maintain the common wealth, because Massachusetts believes that there are things in this world that belong to all of us.

I was prompted to this thought — and to Wednesday afternoon's walk along the Charles — by something that the indispensable Dahlia Lithwick wrote over at Slate as regards the proceedings of the moment in the Supreme Court:

This morning in America's highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don't want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn't really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of "liberty." This case isn't so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It's about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It's about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that's been inspected.

This is a fundamental (and, as we shall see, historically stubborn) American heresy. For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us. That was present at the very beginning, in the Mayflower Compact, which was not a document through which individuals demanded to be free of their obligations to each other and to society; rather, it was a document through which free people bound themselves together, for their own good into a political commonwealth:

Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

This was never far from the country's basic ideals. It was the way that the Founders managed to merge 13 unruly colonies into a single nation — the Declaration of Independence is a lot of things, but a laissez-faire charter of rights isn't one of them — and the Constitution itself lays a burden of commitment on all of us to maintain those things in which we have a common interest, including the general welfare and the common defense. We, The People is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other. It was that obligation that Thomas Jefferson evoked to defend what (at the time) was the monumentally unconstitutional purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France:

"I know that the acquisition of Louisiana has been disapproved by some... that the enlargement of our territory would endanger its union.... The larger our association the less will it be shaken by local passions; and in any view is it not better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children than by strangers of another family?"

We owe each other a debt. We owe each other an obligation. That is the thing to which we truly commit ourselves if we follow our Constitution. It is a charter that enumerates individual liberties, but it is not a license for unbridled greed or reckless political solipsism. We owe each other a debt and we owe each other an obligation, and because of these fundamental American imperatives, there are things that we own in common with each other, and that we are obliged to protect for our posterity. The water. The trees. The wild places in the land. We lose sight of these truths sometimes. Acceleration is the great danger. We lost sight of these truths during the Industrial Age, when the accelerated pace of new manufacturing caught the country by surprise. It was only the long, slow rise of progressive politics that brought these basic truths back to the national mind, and we got the national parks out of it. We have lost sight of these truths again, in the Information Age, when even more accelerated technologies caught us by surprise. It is an open question still whether we will be able to recover that which we have forgotten.

The political system can never catch up on its own. (Believe it or not, the power of corporate money in the late 1800s was even more universal than it is now.) It must be made to catch up by citizens who demand that it respond once again to its basic imperative to protect those things that it must hold in commonwealth for us. At the turn of the last century, that happened because there was room in the Republican party for the Progressive causes that answered those demands, a process that truly didn't end until the 1950s. Today, I am less sure that the room for these answering politics exist any more. The corporate money is seeking to fasten onto our democracy a permanent oligarchy, and it is simultaneously trying to put in place such laws as to make any serious threat to that oligarchy impossible. Most of the infrastructure of this effort is already in place. Where, in either party, is the space wherein a serious political challenge to the oligarchy can rise?

It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and enobled by the effort. That is what I heard coming back to the oligarchs of Americans for Prosperity at their rally in Washington on Tuesday. The rich people behind the rally feel no obligation to the political commonwealth and, therefore, they argue, neither should the people who cheer them on. Citizenship is not an organic unity that exists between self-governing people in a political commonwealth, with benefits and obligations flowing back and forth between individual citizens and the government which is the expression of their voice. Rather, they argue, citizenship is merely a series of transactions between independently acting individuals, and between those people and Government, which is a foreign entity.

A basic philosophy of selfishness is being inculcated into our politics. It will render us incapable of reacting when our democratic patrimony is swindled out from under us. There are thieves abroad in the land, making off with the blessings of the political commonwealth, and their most basic alibi is that it never existed in the first place. Once we accept that as our true history, the future is pretty much lost.

But I have my river and, for the moment, I can walk along it for free. There is that.